NVIDIA's Proposal For A New API Better Than GBM Has Already Made Some Progress

[Guest]

Considering that NVIDIA makes the best GPUs on the planet (they are the Intel to ATi's AMD) it makes sense to listen to what NVIDIA says. Love them or hate them they have more market share, more money, more experience and drivers which run on more platforms than AMDs.

It makes no sense to listen bunch of morons. They're just not playing fair with others and this is the reason they have more market share and money. This crap company should die. I own GeForce 660 Ti GTX, but I'm going to sell it and buy AMD card. Nvidia binary blobs are piece of trash and nouveau is unstable.

[carewolf]

Wait, is EGLStreams actually an improvement over GBM? I thought it was just something they wanted to do because it would be easy for them? If it's actually better then GBM should please GTFO. Or is that just Nvidia rhetoric?

It is "better" because it is easier for NVidia, and it has a few features GBM has needed yet, but could very easily add.

[bug77]

Think about it - why would NVidia take this path, flatly rejecting the community choice of GBM, but being open to coming developing a shared new API? It's obvious that GBM just wasn't an option for them - that they simply couldn't implement it for their driver. ...

As far as I understand, it's not the Nvidia couldn't implement GBM, it's that doing so would have incurred hefty performance penalties. But the only source for that is Nvidia engineers, so add the mandatory pinch of salt.

[Cape]

I think the real reason why Nvidjia can't support GBM is the middleware they are using in their drivers which they cannot control.
They probably need to feed more info into these tools than GBM is currently doing to create an optimized stack. Maybe the surface of attack of these crap is limited to eglstream and other protocols...

Anyway, inclusivity and sane standard are always welcome because they spearhead the diffusion of FOSS. Problem is DEFINING THEM IN TIME! Not 4 fucking years later, when the protocol is already stable and everybody have a working stack.

[lumks]

Not that i care even 0.1% for NVidia or nvidia users. but why the fuck dont they just support GBM NOW and develop that "new $SHINYMARKETINGNAME thing" together with the freedriver guys for the future? Just like "our users are more important than our controll over that API thing, so here, use wayland but let us show that it will work much better in future"

once again linus was correct with "fuck you nvidia"

[starshipeleven]

That's kind of a silly thing to say given any two architectures from both companies are different.

It's not a matter of architecture, but of the fact that NVIDIA is wrapping their windows driver whole in a shim to make it run on Linux/Unix/wherever.

If the linux system is feeding stuff to the driver in a way the current closed windows driver cannot understand, they need to expand their shim and add hacks and whatever, sacrificing performance.

They cannot touch the actual driver, if they could it would be easy to add GBM without having performance issues.

[M@GOid]

It's not a matter of architecture, but of the fact that NVIDIA is wrapping their windows driver whole in a shim to make it run on Linux/Unix/wherever.

If the linux system is feeding stuff to the driver in a way the current closed windows driver cannot understand, they need to expand their shim and add hacks and whatever, sacrificing performance.

They cannot touch the actual driver, if they could it would be easy to add GBM without having performance issues.

The point is: this is their problem. Not Intel, not AMD, not Gnome, not KDE, not (insert DE) problem. They create this problem, is their responsibility to deal with it.

When AMD implemented their video acceleration API in Linux, it was a disaster. So instead of crying like a baby to everybody follow their path they implemented Nvidia's VDPAU.

Now is time to Nvidia swallow their pride and follow the path others are taking, instead of demanding everybody to do their way.

[starshipeleven]

The point is: this is their problem.

I agree, I was just explaining the actual reasons, to make sure people didn't start to think bs like NVIDIA's GPU architecture isn't right for GBM or whatever other crap.

Now is time to Nvidia swallow their pride and follow the path others are taking, instead of demanding everybody to do their way.

I'm suspecting it won't work like that, NVIDIA's linux/unix driver is a best-effort already, they don't fix many minor bugs and things, and some not-so-minor things too. Either because they cannot (the team is making only the wrapper and cannot change the driver inside) or because they aren't granted the resources to (management thinks linux desktop market isn't worth allocating more man-hours than this).

I suspect that the linux/unix NVIDIA driver devs (those taking the windows driver and wrapping it up) only have three choices currently:
-convince linux to switch to EGLStreams
-go with GBM and take a performance hit
-not support wayland alltogether, and keep performance as-is.

Not saying that we all should bow to our new master EGLStreams, but that NVIDIA might have genuinely hit a serious brick wall with their current closed source driver and their management may not think it's worth it to adapt it at all.

Thus AMD/Intel will likely take the great opportunity to jump in and steal the massive revenue that comes from the huge market of gamers on linux desktop, in the following years.

[starshipeleven]

unapproved post for @M@GOid above

[Delgarde]

Nvidia: So, let's change the world because the world is wrong. We're just a bunch of standup guys and you are all dumb.

Be realistic, here. What you describe as "the world" consists of drivers for just two significant hardware manufacturers, AMD and Intel.

So if NVidia can't copy the approach used by those drivers, and wants to collaborate on a third way - this is *not* a huge campaign to screw over the community. Yes, it creates a bit more work for everyone - but if it helps resolve the situation where one of the three major GPU platforms cannot cope with Wayland, it's worth trying to make it work. Afterall, if you want people to move to Linux as you suggest - surely you don't want to exclude those with NVidia hardware?